Posted
by
CmdrTaco
on Tuesday May 18, 2004 @07:56AM
from the ludicrous-lawsuits-for-everyone dept.

WK writes "Now that Google's IPO is running, the company is on the verge of being sued by the family of Professor Edward Kasner who invented the word 'Googol' to describe a very big number. The great-niece of Kasner who was 4 years old at the time her uncle died says that although Google has brought attention to the name, it has not brought attention to Kasner's work. Google was not using the concepts, but just capitalizing on the name."

Uh... ignoring for a moment that raw cynicism inherent in that statement, isn't Google running a Dutch Auction IPO partly as a way of eliminating the whole insider/outsider dichotomy? (and partly has a way to make much more money) So the family can't become "insiders" because there won't be any insiders.

Hmmm... perhaps they just mean they want to be given shares of the company pre-IPO (not an "insider" in the traditional IPO sense). That seems even more greedy and cynical to me - there's no gamble involved at all on their part.

What really kills me is that Google has acknowledged that their name is a play on the word "googol" since they first appeared. I guess the interested parties never did a google search for Googol [google.com] (which actually brings up a link for http://www.googol.com [googol.com]...not suing *them*, are they?), or looked at the company's history [google.com] page.

During lawsuits between Intel and AMD over the 486, the courts ruled that a number cannot be trademarked. That's why Intel's next chip was called the Pentium, not the 586. (Intel also named the later 486 chips "i486".) This is also why Google chose to NOT use the name "googol", because they wouldn't be able to trademark that.

There's also the issue of scope. A trademark does not usually apply to everything, but to a limited area. If the areas of use are distinct and unlikely to cause confusion, the same name can be used by different companies. That's why Apple Records and Apple Computer were able to coexist (until iPod and iTunes came along -- expect some serious friction coming from these two). A search site and a number are unlikely to be confused.

Finally there is the issue of asserting ownership. Trademarks can be lost if they are not used or enforced. The usual examples of companies on the verge of losing their trademarks due to non-enforcement are Xerox and Kleenex. The family has allowed (you might even say encouraged) the term googol to be used by the mathematics community for decades. To now assert that the word should be reserved for only "authorized" use is ridiculous.

While this is often repeated, it's not completely true. A judge can dismiss your suit with prejudice, and can even charge you with contempt or the crime of barratry, depending on how poorly conceived your suit is. It is therefore a crime to sue over some things.

The total number of particles in the universe is estimated between 10^72 and 10^87 [stormloader.com]. A googol is 13 orders of magnituted higher then that. That means a googol is about 10 trillion times bigger then the numbers of particles in teh universe.
A googolhedron is 10^300 particles so it's 213 orders of magnitutde greater. Even if we raelise the univerese is 100 trillion times smaller then we thought, we're still not even covering a speck of what is needed. Big numbers are stupid that way.
Just some food for thought

Except that Google's founders will control super voting stock which makes them the ultimate "insiders". Depending on how many shares are offered, they will likely have 90% of the voting rights of the company's total offering. Most of the time, this class of stock is non dilutive, unless the owners agree to let their vote be diluted. So even if they grant 100,000,000 options a year, they keep the same percentage of control over directors, board meetings, and other strategic decisions.

The way I understand it they aren't doing it to 'make more money.' The powers that be have (FTC?) authorized Google to go public assuming a certain valuation of the company as a whole, so instead of picking the number of shares and coming up with IPO price, they are determining via Dutch Auction the share price and coming up with the number of shares (and selling those shares to the top guys in the Dutch Auction.)

And yes, it pretty much eliminates insiders, which is the coolest thing I have ever heard of - unless I get to be an insider too, like the googol folks.

Well I remember as a child running through the Austrian snow one January and shouting Yahooooooooooooo! So I think I'll be finding myself a bod damned lawyer and suing the asses off those Yahoo! guys. Oh, am I gonna be rich!

Oh yeah, and you bastards from alta (la) vista should be quaking in your boots. I'm in my hummer right now.

Actually its not a requirement to go public (IKEA USA is a private company).

When you have over 500 shareholders you have to beging acting as if you were public even if youre not. That combined with the fact their initial investors have been screaming at them to do this for a couple of years kinda pushed them over the edge..

Nonsense. There is an SEC regulation that requires them to file reports as if they were public if they have more than a given number (500?) of shareholders and a given amount or revenue (or income? $10mil?).

Anyway, they hit that point where they have to do the reporting work of a publicly-traded company, which meant that the added work of going public wasn't as onerous.

Yes, your numbers are correct. It is 500 shareholders or $10 million in assets. The SEC [64.233.167.104] Website contains the corporate reporting guidelines set forth by the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 [64.233.167.104].

The SEC oversees all companies that trade "shares" for investment. If I had given Google one million dollars in 2000, in exchange for a certain number of "shares" in the company, then I would become a "shareholder" even if they never IPO'd. I would have a vested interest in Google's future and profit margin, even though I have no employment there.

Once you hit a certain plateau of shareholders (and profits), then you must behave like a public company in order to prevent fraud.

Yes, because the trademarked it. Googel was never trademarked. That would be like whoever came up with the word "bling" trying to sue rappers for using it. (which I for one would welcome, but that is beside the point)

*raises hand* I am. And I'm not alone. Google predates googol, as was discussed in the May 9 Sunday Boston Globe, Feelin' Googly [boston.com]. Jan Freeman [boston.com] traces the life of google from 1380 to the present day. It seems more likely googol sprang from google, than other way round.

The founders of Google admit they were inspired by googol, but as words of the english language, google predates, and most likely inspired, googol. Google should sue!

I truly feel the family has no case here. They truly sound like opportunitists trying to make money out of something they could not. To me, the word 'Googol' is nothing more than a symlink to something else. If I were to come up with 'Moogol' for 10^10, and Moogle.com made money, would I sue? No. Despite the play on words, and the inherient meaning, they used nothing else.

Should the Amazon rainforest, or Brazil sue Amazon? No.

Should Half the Planet sue HalfThePlanet.com for their use of the name and reference to those with disabilities? No.

Should keyboard manfacturers sue Slashdot for using a word that describes two keys on their keyboard '/.' Well maybe, but I still say no.

As for not bringing attention to Kesner's work, the attention is in the name and meaning, and it's referenced on the corporate pagehttp://www.google.com/corporate/index.html What more does the family want? Money. Isn't there a timeframe also when the word becomes public domain?

The name is indeed based on the word googol. Google gives credit to the inventors: I quote from the Google coporate information page:

Google is a play on the word googol, which was coined by Milton Sirotta, nephew of American mathematician Edward Kasner, and was popularized in the book, "Mathematics and the Imagination" by Kasner and James Newman. It refers to the number represented by the numeral 1 followed by 100 zeros. Google's use of the term reflects the company's mission to organize the immense, seemingly infinite amount of information available on the web.

I agree that it's a money grab. There's not even any valid trademarks for the term "googol" by itself, the only "live" ones are all part of something else, and none are even remotely related to web searching.

Google is a play on the word googol, which was coined by Milton Sirotta, nephew of American mathematician Edward Kasner, and was popularized in the book, "Mathematics and the Imagination" by Kasner and James Newman. It refers to the number represented by the numeral 1 followed by 100 zeros. Google's use of the term reflects the company's mission to organize the immense, seemingly infinite amount of information available on the web.

The name "Barney Google" is familiar to anyone who ever watched a TV retrospective of comic strips -- he's the guy with the "goo-goo-googly eyes" in the 1923 Billy Rose song they always play in such retrospectives. Many newspapers use his name in the title of one of their comic strips. And in 1995, he was honored by the U.S. Postal Service in its "Comic Strip Classics" series of commemorative stamps.

I think Billy DeBeck, creator of the strip, has a better claim to prior art than the nephew.

Did you know that every single digital artwork known to man and yet to be created/discovered exists a priori?

All digital artworks can be represented as one big binary number (typically with a lot more digits than a googol).

Would you therefore use the argument that just because a digitally reprsentable work can be represented as a number from 1 to infintity (and hence exists a priori) that it therefore belongs in the public domain?

I'm sorry but this is fucking retarded. Why would anyone think it would be okay to sue a company named Google for using a possible variant of the un-trademarked word Googol to describe a business that creates a data searching system? If there is a connection, why doesn't dictionary.com show one in the google definition [reference.com]? I could see perhaps a case if Google was called Googol, but this appears to be nothing more than a cash grab by a family of broke twits. Besides, the guy didn't invent the word! His 9 year old nephew did [www.fpx.de]! From that link: The american mathematician Edward Kasner once asked his nine-year-old nephew to invent a name for a very large number, ten to the power of one hundred; and the boy called it a googol.

"Googol" is the mathematical term for a 1 followed by 100 zeros. The term was coined by Milton Sirotta, nephew of American mathematician Edward Kasner, and was popularized in the book, "Mathematics and the Imagination" by Kasner and James Newman. Google's play on the term reflects the company's mission to organize the immense amount of information available on the web.

Mickey Mouse is a brand name and Disney goes to great links to protect that. Same with Star Trek and Frodo. Googol, on the other hand, is a word. It has never been associated with any brand or trademark this family owns or derives income from.

This is nothing more than a bullshit land grab by theives. Period. They are trying to steal from Google and I wonder what snake put them up to it if they hadn't come up with it themselves...absolute crap.

As the story goes, he was trying to come up with a good name for 10^100. He asked a little kid (some say his nephew) for a name, and the kid responded, "Call it a googol."
This is ridiculous, by the way. It's like the guy who came up with the word "milennium" suing LucasFilm because of Star Wars.

Some dead Greek guy's relative sues MPAA over use of the word 'Pi' as a movie title.Roman mathematician's descendents sue Dr. Evil over the use of the word "Million"Parker Brothers sued over the name 'Mr. Green' in the popular "Clue" game by the guy who invented that word.

This post brought to you by the number 3(TM), the letter P(TM) and the color yellow(TM).

Intel found this out to their cost when clone 486 chips came out. On attempting to sue Cyrix et al, they were unable to prevent them from using the number names. Hence the move to the (trademarked) brand name "Pentium".

The World-Wide Web search engine that indexes the greatest number of web pages - over two billion by December 2001 and provides a free service that searches this index in less than a second.

The site's name is apparently derived from "googol", but note the difference in spelling.

The "Google" spelling is also used in "The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy" by Douglas Adams, in which one of Deep Thought's designers asks, "And are you not," said Fook, leaning anxiously foward, "a greater analyst than the Googleplex Star Thinker in the Seventh Galaxy of Light and Ingenuity which can calculate the trajectory of every single dust particle throughout a five-week Dangrabad Beta sand blizzard?"

So instead of having her father's name attached to a hugely successful web search engine she'd rather have it attached to some lawsuit that is going to make her family look like a bunch of assholes once the media gets wind of it.

In 1955 he died and much later a search engine called Google was born. His relatives claim that Kasner must be spinning in his grave. They believe Google has gained financially at their expense and they want to become IPO insiders to put his soul to rest.

As wel all know, potentially large sums of money can put a deceased loved one to rest. Why doesn't Google solve it creatively? Add a small line of text with a link that states what a googol is, with a tribute to Kasner, his work and his other achievements? The man and his work have been recognized, the family doesn't get a cent and everyone, except those greedy bastards, is happy.

I heard about this on NPR a couple weeks ago, before any lawsuit was going to happen. The sad thing is that only ONE idiot from the family is really pushing this- when she came on to be interviewed for a couple minutes by NPR, she said: "My sister wanted me to say that it isn't *THE FAMILY* who has a big problem with this, it is *just me.*" No joke- the rest of them are probably embarassed of her actions.

Bah! It appears to be just another relative trying to cash in on someone else's work, like the decendants of the guy who copyrighted the "happy birthday" song awhile back.

Besides, no one has seen fit to defend the implied trademark (though registered? I'm thinking "not), so I doubt that the lawsuit gets anywhere... I suspect a couple of relatives saw Google's IPO numbers and decided to try at cashing in.

the use of G and an 'o' for each page of search results ending with the 'gle'

this may be a legitimate claim, but it is made completely weak by the circumstances (google's IPO namely) and to my knowledge the term "googol" is in most unabridged dictionaries defining a number of value one with one hundred zeros.

after 12 or 13 sides, regular polygons are named by their prefix and the 'gon' suffix. my favorite one? googolgon. transform!

Does anyone think its the slightest bit innovative to give a name to a very big number? I think this is just a publicity scam capitalizing on the coming IPO. Google's lawyers should have to trouble with this one.

At what point are people -- rational people-- going to get together and form a coalition to bring about a bloodless coup, lift the Democrats and Republicans from office, wipe clean the slate of stupid laws and ridiculous political/legal traditions, form a new American government starting from the foundation of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, and finally make it so that bullshit like this is the exception rather than the norm? Good God, the nation's gone absolutely ape-shit. When's the revolution, and how can it be brought about without further bloodshed? Ridiculous lawsuits like this are just a symptom of how detached from reality the US has gotten.

I'm good and sick of this "lawyerocracy" we have here. I'd love to see a "geekocracy".

But seriously, our society is WAY WAY WAY too litigious and opportunistic for anyone's good. On what grounds based in reality does the family of the man who invented the word "Googol" have to the Internet search engine company?

I don't doubt that some mathematician will discover a formula or specific method of doing a calculation, will name it after himself, and then try to patent it to prevent universities and schools from teaching it.

There should be a law that prevents this type of thing. "Googol" represents a number, that's all. What's to copyright? Had Google not existed, these people wouldn't have made a profit anyway. They're flat out using the law in a way it WASN'T meant to be used

According to the original article in the Baltimore Sun [baltimoresun.com], the family hasn't decided to sue yet. They probably know that they don't really have a case. 'sides, all they want is to be insiders for the IPO, atm, not get zillions in punitive damages or trademark-violation damages. Of course, this could all change if they don't get the chance to be insiders for the IPO.

So no, this doesn't really seem like a case of folks suing google 'cause they are violating the common-law trademark rights of the 4-year old who came up with "googol"...yet.

Years ago, Coca-Cola lost the second half of its name to the public domain, when a judge ruled that "Cola" had become a generic term for referring to soft drinks. Similarly, "Aspirin" started as a brand name and wound up as the generic name for the drug. This is why the makers of "Kleenex" brand facial tissues bother with the "brand facial tissues" part, because there MUST be a viable generic term for a defendable brand name to exist.

-Motley fool web site

There's several rulings about names that ARE trademarked "falling" into public domain, and it's basically, you're a victim of your own success. Since the word Googol was used as a mathematical term, and has no doubt been used in numerous papers, discussions, etc., I have little belief that this suit would succeed, since the term has definitely been in the public domain for a long time.

That being said, it would be nice if the Google folks maybe put up some of that IPO money to help kids learn math, or something....

Talk about trying to cash in on success! I doubt they have a legal leg to stand on. To my knowledge googol wasn't trademarked. So it's not like he was trying to restrict use of the term. In fact, since an effort was made to get it into the general mathematical parlance, pretty much the opposite is true.

This whole thing is ludicris. First of all, I don't think anyone is entitled to derivatives of parts of speech contributed to the general language. If I name 10 ^ 6653 a "haloplex" that's great, but it doesn't mean I can control people using the name. A single integer is not intellectual property. 17 is not, 10^100 is not.

What about other word derived terms? Trillian? Is whoever can prove a DNA link to the person who first uttered "million" , "billion", etc going to sue people for refering to someone as a "millionaire"? Or the governments of the world for issuing budgets in billions and trillions?

I may be wrong, and I suppose I shouldn't trust evil Google to check, but I thought the actual name for the number was a "googleplex"? And why aren't they going after GooglePlex Media [thegoogleplex.com]?

Google is near and dear to a lot of nerds' hearts, mine included. One of my favorite profs in college was a good friend of Brin, and got me started using Google when the whole thing was still beta.

Who's Billy DeBeck, you ask? Why, just the guy who created the comic strip character Barney Google [toonopedia.com] (you know, the guy with the "goo-goo-googly eyes"?!) and King Features Syndicate for distributing the cartoon for the past EIGHTY-FIVE YEARS (which, by the way, doesn't predate Mr. Kastner but which DOES predate the coining of the word "googol" [4reference.net] by at least a decade.)

It's this kind of frivolous abuse of the courts that keeps real and legitimate cases that might bring about real reforms and improvements from being effective (or even successful.)

The standard for trademark is confusion in the marketplace. I.e., will consumers be confused about the similarities in the names. E.g., I could legally open an automobile repair facility called McDonalds because consumers would not confuse crappy food with having your car repaired.

From what I gather, Kasner's family has absolutely no business from which consumers could get confused. They're essentially trying to trademark a word merely because a former family member came up with it. That's not the law. Not only will this case get kicked out, the family will be sanctioned for bringing it.

Let me get this straight: 60 years ago a mathematician used a different word that's not spelled the same but sounds a bit like google when spoken -- although I'd like the see a pronunciation key for googol -- and now they're claiming that google got their name by drawing on the inifinte wisdom of the bloke the just kinda pulled a word out of his ass to represent 'one million gajillion billions'.

What I want to know is how poor of mathematician was this guy that his crowning contribution to math was the word 'googol'? Or better yet, how incredibly stupid is the son to think his dad's crowning contribution to math is the word 'googol'?

As an aside, do they think it could possibly be the case that google got its name from other words... like maybe:

...and wait until the King Features Syndicate and/or the heirs of Billy Rose start knocking at the door. The comic strip was created by Billy DeBeck in 1919, so I guess maybe they're in the clear until the next copyright-extension law gets passed--although the comic strip still exists, as "Snuffy Smith." The song is later than that and is probably still under copyright. You all know it, right?

Right?

Baaaaaaaarney Google!With the goo-goo-googley eyes!Baaaaaaaarney Google!Had a wife three times his size!She sued Barney for divorce--Now he's living with his horse--Baaaaaaaarney Google!With the goo-goo-googley eyes!

This is a side-note really, since it doesn't deal with the word googol, but it's at least halfway on-topic...

I was talking to a friend who works at Google, and apparently the general consensus is that the company does not want the name of the company to be verbed like Xerox has. Like:

"Just go google 'litigious bastards' and see what comes up!"

I can see where they're coming from, as once a term makes it into the lexicon like there is a considerable dilution to the name. Xerox fought that for years. I'm not entirely sure the same thing could happen in this case- but I bet a lot of people were saying the same thing at Xerox in the early 80's.

In other news, Googool family now suing every baby who utters the phrase goo goo. Parents who teach this phrase to their children without a Googool licence are being imprisioned for IP theft. They don't want money, they just want recognition.

Let's say that the term "googol" WAS trademarked. I'd guess that it was never trademarked in the area of "computerized search engine" (whatever trademark category that would fall under).

There is precedence, though: the whole "Microsoft vs Mike Rowe Software" thing. Granted, in this case Mr Rowe's computer-oriented company name sounded just like the larger and more well-known computer-oriented company's name, and there is a potential for confusion. Certainly, there was no malice intended by Mr Rowe, an